A sorrowful nation writes ‘Letters to Jackie’

One of the more buzzed-about documentaries set to screen at Washington’s AFI Docs Festival is “Letters to Jackie,” a film directed by Bill Couturié that features letters to former first lady Jackie Kennedy in the wake of her husband’s assassination.

The letters are read by such famous actors as Jessica Chastain, Chris Cooper, Viola Davis, Laura Linney and Betty White. The film is timed to mark the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which is in November, but the screening is part of the kickoff to the festival, which starts Wednesday.

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“For us baby boomers, the Kennedy assassination was a watershed moment,” Couturié told POLITICO. “There’s not a single person who was alive and cognizant that doesn’t remember where they were when they heard the news.”

Couturié remembers where he was at that moment.

“I was 13 and I was in PE class in high school — a freshman — when the news came across the PA system. Some of the kids in the class cheered. I was in a Republican area and I was shocked that people would cheer the death of a president. And it sort of changed my life. I realized that I’m not one of those guys, I guess I must be a Democrat. And I’ve never forgotten that. So when I saw this 50th anniversary coming up and saw the power of these letters, I just had the idea to make a film.”

The movie is based on letters compiled in a book of the same name by Ellen Fitzpatrick, and Couturié explained the nation’s ongoing fascination with the Kennedys: “They were gorgeous, they were rich, they were all that stuff, but what I got from the letters is that people really identified with the family. Kennedy had fought in World War II. He came home, he got married, he had two children, so very, very similar to millions of other Americans at the time. … Him being the first president born in the 20th century and the youngest ever elected, he was a breath of fresh air at a time when the country was ready for that and so I think that he, in a remarkable way, hit the zeitgeist. He was the right man at the right time, and I think people enjoyed the sense of a new generation taking charge of the country.”